Wild animal slaughter on an unprecedented scale. Of owls.
Bluntly put, the public is being misled — aka, lied to — about why 450,000 magnificent, wild, American-born barred owls are right now being hunted and killed in the (mostly) public forests of California, Oregon and Washington State.
This massive, slaughter, unprecedented in scope, is underway, and will continue for the next 30 years, across 24 million acres, at a cost of $1.3 taxpayer dollars.
Please read the above paragraph again. The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Services’ (USFWS) own conservative bureaucracy estimates that approximately 450,000 wild owls need to be hunted down — or lured out of their nests — and shotgunned to death in the forests of these 3 western U.S. states including in many national parks, including Yosemite and Lassen National Park and Point Reyes National Seashore in CA, and Olympic National Park in WA.
Barred Owl Mass Slaughter (BOMS)
VIDEO (above): TreeSpirit’s Jack Gescheidt explains how shooting hundreds of thousands of protected (by the Migratory Bird Treat Act) Barred owls is actually a clever way for timber companies to get “incidental take” permits from the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service to log forests where the protected (by the Endangered Species Act) Northern spotted owl lives.
This brutal, bloody, ecologically monstrous killing campaign — aka, “BOMS,” the acronym for Barred Owl Mass Slaughter ( well actually the USFWS calls it their barred owl “management” plan, but we don’t repeat that deceitful, Orwellian name). It’s the largest slaughter of a single species of wild animals by a government agency in the modern era.
Nor has the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service ever before targeted for extermination this many wild animals who have federal protection — in this case by the agency’s own Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918. That protection is being ignored, overridden. And then thousands of Northern spotted owls will be killed, too, because timber companies will be given permits to destroy their forest homes by loggin forests, including old-growth forests, where the Threatened spotted owl lives. Logging reduces ALL owl habitat, and is one large reason the targeted Barred owl has been on the move for decades, searching for any remaining forests where they can live in peace.
The real reason for mass-killing owls
To cut to the chase: logging (timber) companies are not allowed to log forests where the Northern spotted owl lives because they are protected by the Endangered Species Act (ESA). This includes the precious few remaining old-growth forests which sequester more carbon and harbor more wild animals then logged-and-replanted timber company forests. Man-planted, timber company commercially re-seeded forests are more like artificial, tree ‘re-plantations,’ They are comparatively devoid of wildlife because they lack the complexity and biodiversity of older natural and unlogged forests.
The Northern spotted owl has greater protection than the barred owl, with its Endangered Species “Threatened” status. A century of logging has destroyed millions of acres of dense, old-growth, healthy forest. Additional forest habitat has been lost due to the anthropogenically heating climate, which is an indirect result of U.S. (and global) logging.
The spotted owl, at least as of 2025, still has the additional protection granted it under the ESA — and that’s what the BOMS owl-killing plan is cleverly, deceptively, dastardly circumventing. (The new 2026 U.S. Administration is anti-nature, anti-wildlife, pro-pesticides and pro-logging. It is aggressively dismantling all environmental protections, for wild animals and forests. (As of July, 2026, proposing to nullify even the protections of the Endangered Species Act by allowing logging forests and other wild animal habitat, arguing that this is unrelated to wild animal survival.) (The ESA was already compromised and corrupted by big business in previous administrations, but was much better than no protections.)
So, until now, Northern spotted owl habitat forests can’t be logged, unless…
An end run around ESA protections, to log forests, and end owls
But even under the Endangered Species protection, timber companies can be given special permission to the indirectly kill protected Northern spotted owls — with so-called “incidental take permits” — if timber companies claim they’re taking action — a “mitigation” to help spotted owls overall.
So timber companies concocted this false narrative: killing 1/2-million barred owls will benefit the spotted owl by reducing “competition” for the spotted owl’s habitat and food. By killing approximately 1/2-million barred owls over 30 years — a “Barred Owl Mass Slaughtrer — the Northern spotted owl supposedly benefits, even though its forests will be logged, its homes destroyed, too. Along with every other species of owl who lives in forests.
Weaponizing the Endangered Species Act, using one protected species to kill another
VIDEO: July 28, 2026 Sky-Jack Podcast: the Barred Owls Mass Slaughter. With Special Guest Heather King, “Thee Owl Queen” and her amazing videos of barred owls in the wild.
TAKE NOTE: spotted and barred owls are not just competitors; they also cooperate — they mate to produce what we simple-minded, ignorant humans label “sparred owls.” This biological reality undercuts the BOMS narrative of one owls being an “invasive species,” so it is underplayed, or ignored entirely.
The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service is servicing the timber industry with its BOMS plan; weaponizing the Endangered Species Act, pitting one species against another in a wildly simplified and scientifically invalid overview of how complex ecosystems and the animals who have lived with each for thousands of years. This also involved the “invasive” label and Invasion Biology.
READ MORE about how “Invasion Biology” is used by industry to justify killing millions of wild animals (and plants too).
Typical of most, if not all, wildlife killing campaigns done in the name of “restoration” or “protection,” the BOMS is a gross oversimplification of the complex interactions between owl species and their habitats, their predation habits, even their natural hybridization — the two owl species are known to mate, producing what we grossly ignorant, label-happy humans label, “sparred” owls.
The spotted-vs-barred owls ‘competitors’ narrative isn’t entirely true, but it contains some truth, which is enough to get many self-described “conservationists” especially large, venerated non-profits with massive corporate funding, like The Audubon Society and The Nature Conservancy, which for years been corrupted by corporate dollars.
There are financial counter-incentives to speaking out against BOMS and preventing hundreds of thousands of wild owls from being hunted down and shot. So much for the large nature-protecting and bird-loving non-profits. The prestigious pro-bird Audubon Society is onboard with the slaughter, is in favor of killing 1/2-million wild barred owls in forests across three western states for 30 years — and also incidentally, accidentally killing thousands of spotted owls, too, who will be mistakenly shot in the dead of night by barred owl hunter-killers.
Simple timber company lies sell better than complex truths about nature.
For one, barred and spotted owls also mate; interbreed. They’re not just competitors. They produce what some humans label “sparred” owls; a natural, healthy hybrid owl from the two species. So killing barred owls to “protect” spotted owls is a simplistic, incomplete, inaccurate narrative.
For two, barred owls have migrated from eastern states to western states over decades because of, yup, that’s right, deforestation by the logging industry. Owl homes and entire habitats have been obliterated by the same profit-driven, environment-destroying for-profit, nature-pillaging forces which will now hunt them down and kill owls in wilder western forests. The USFWS, acting per usual as a corporate proxy-partner, will issue “take (capture, kill, hunt, pursue) permits” for hundreds of yahoo hunters out for a buck — called “professional” hunters by the USFW, of course — to hunt and shoot hundreds of thousands of barred owls at night, in their peaceful forest homes.
Grisly. Pointless. Endless.
Even though 450,000+ owls is a huge, chilling, killing tally, it will not kill all barred owls. It is not a total extermination of the species. That’s the ‘good’ news. But the accompanying ‘bad’ news is that these killer vacancies mean other barred owls from outside the huge killing zones within CA, OR and WA will fly in to take the place of their slain brothers and sisters.
Inevitably, the industry will want to kill those owls in the future, too, for some same similar fabricated pretext. But the real reason is getting at the trees, the board feet, the dollars. This is is modern, industry-driven, and once again Orwellian “wildlife “management.”
The Big Picture culprit: the ideology of Invasion Biology
All this endless, monstrous killing is the typical result of the simplistic, pseudo-scientific — and tragically widespread, widely believed — ideology of Invasion Biology, which has humans playing God, deciding which animals are Good and which are Bad — and which should live or die. In almost all cases, animals labeled “invasive” — a popular but entirely non-scientific term — are targeted for death or in many cases actually targeted for extermination.
But this ideology is only rarely seen for what it is, when the target is universally beloved, as is the owl, who is harmless to humans. And when the death toll of “native” species “restoration” is so gargantuan as to be seen for what it is: brutal and insane.
With the owls, so much so, that conservative Louisiana Senator John Kennedy even spoke about the insanity of the Invasion Biology philosophy — even though he never mentioned it, and likely doesn’t know what it is. But the mass-killing under the USFWS’ so-called Barred Owl Management Strategy (BOMS) caught even his attention. And he’s a duck hunter. He took the issue onto he floor of the Senate, even though his bid to stop the slaughter was unsuccessful: READ MORE.
The legal challenge to the Barred Owls Mass Slaughter
A legal challenge to the BOMS was advanced by a coalition of over 200 animal welfare & environmental organizations as separate federal court filings in Washington and Oregon. Key plaintiffs include Animal Wellness Action, The Center for a Humane Economy, and Friends of Animals.
These have been consolidated into a single case being heard in Oregon’s U.S. District Court.
The plaintiffs are arguing that the federal government’s plan:
1) Relied on faulty, deficient data and failed to properly evaluate the ecological impacts of widespread hunting across 24 million acres of forest. (Which seems a reasonable assertion for the largest-ever federally sanctioned animal killing campaign in the modern era. Perhaps only the government’s sanctioning the slaughter of America’s bison, to decimate native Americans in the 1800s compares.)
2) Did not adequately consider the huge impact of thousands of active shooters in public forests, for 30 years, would not only disturb Northern spotted owls, but also countless thousands more wild animals who live across 24 million acres of forests.
READ Courthouse News ARTICLE – June 3, 2026: https://courthousenews.com/animal-rights-groups-claim-feds-used-faulty-data-to-permit-barred-owl-removal/
WHAT YOU CAN DO.
Stop the killing, cut the funding.
• FILL OUT this In Defense of Animals ALERT to contact your Congressional representatives in the U.S. House & Senate: https://www.idausa.org/campaign/wild-animals-and-habitats/latest-news/will-475000-owls-be-massacred-for-the-timber-industry/
• SIGN “Hoot for Justice” PETITION to cut the (Barred Owls Mass Slaughter) “BOMS” killing program’s funding. Gathering together U.S. and Canadian citizens to demand defunding this $1.3 billion, 30-year owls (of several owl species, not just barred and spotted) program:
https://www.change.org/p/stop-the-kill-plan-hoot-for-justice
• READ Animal Wellness Action JUNE 1, 2026 UPDATE (with news of its lawsuit challening the Barred Owls Mass Slaughtering plan: https://animalwellnessaction.org/court-clash-with-fws-over-unworkable-inhumane-scheme-to-kill-american-forest-owls/’
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